If you happen to visit the Estes Park Medical Center you might run into the lead singer of a rock band, an FBI trained hostage negotiator and an ice climber. They're all the same person: Estes Park Medical Center Vice President of Professional Services Karen Nicholson.

Originally from Kansas, Nicholson spent summers with her family in Estes Park working on the family cabin. Her grandfather and great uncle came to Estes Park in the 1940s and each bought some land upon which to build.

"It was this multigenerational love for the mountains that kept bringing us back," Nicholson said. "Every summer we'd come and we'd work on a different part of the cabin, like putting on a deck. When it started there was just an outhouse and no running water, yikes!"

Karen Nicholson performs with Amplified Souls at Lonigan's on August 6. (Courtesy photo)

As Nicholson and her three sisters got older they began to take on summer jobs in Estes Park. Nicholson worked at Safeway in 1985, the year it opened, and eventually all four sisters worked together at Ed's Cantina for the same summer. In 1994, her brother-in-law, Chris Hill, Bought Ed's. He owned it with her sister, Kristen, until 2010 when her other sister, Karla Dubios, bought it from them.

"We all kind of landed there together," Nicholson said. "It was a really fun time and now Ed's has been in the family for more than 20 years."

Growing up and spending the summer in Estes Park, Nicholson became friends with some of the local climbers who took her into Rocky Mountain National Park to try her hand at both rock and ice climbing.

Advertisement

"Estes Park has a well known climbing scene and I had a lot of friends who were climbers," Nicholson said. "We'd go out into the Park and ice or rock climb."

Her singing career also started during her summers in Estes Park. In the mid 1980s at Fawn Valley Inn, local musician and Estes Park icon Dick Orleans offered open mic sessions. Nicholson started performing there when she was 16.

"Dick played guitar and I sang," Nicholson said. "It was really great and by the early 90s I was writing my own music and lyrics."

In 1994 Nicholson recorded and released an album, which featured Estes Park musicians like Brad Fitch. However, her longest-lasting musical collaboration is with the rock band Amplified Souls. She joined the group in 2003 when it was called True North and, except for a four-year hiatus when Nicholson had her three children, the group has been together ever since.

"We took a break when I was seven months pregnant with my eldest and got back together when I was eight months pregnant with my youngest," Nicholson said.

Even though she had up until that point been more of a folk singer, Nicholson took to the group's rock and roll style. Her children have taken to it as well. Her husband of nearly 15 years, Blake, will bring their children Decker, Ben and Hannah to her shows. Each has their own favorite song and will come up on stage during the performance.

"Hannah has to be on stage for "Sweet Child of Mine,"" Nicholson said. "It's actually getting hard to get her off stage now!"

If you are interested in seeing Nicholson perform with Amplified Souls, you can catch one of their upcoming shows: Aug. 6 at Longian's in Estes Park at 8:30 p.m.; Aug. 8 at the Larimer County Fair; and Aug. 26 at the Ben and Jerry's summer concert series in Fort Collins.

In her professional life Nicholson has been pursuing a career in healthcare administration, first in Kansas then in Greeley. For the last nine years she has been at the Estes Park Medical Center where she oversees the Physicians Clinic and the Medical Staff Office. With her background in medicine Nicholson chose an interesting way to give back to the community: hostage negotiation.

In 2015 Nicholson took the FBI's course in hostage negotiation and now serves as a volunteer mental health consultant to the Larimer County Sheriff's hostage negotiation team.

"I work with a highly-skilled team," Nicholson said. "The cases I've worked on involved a person in crisis. My role is to provide a perspective on what that person might be going through at that time."

Nicholson said that since she started working with the hostage negotiation team she has responded to three calls, all of which ended positively.

In addition to her consulting in hostage situations, Nicholson teaches Crisis Intervention Team training courses to law enforcement officers in Larimer, Weld and Boulder counties. Many officers take the CIT training to learn how to communicate with people who are in "crisis," such as a distressed child or an adult suffered from mental illness.

With her long history in Estes Park, Nicholson said being able to live and work there is great privilege. She said she values being able to witness the good work done by the doctors and staff that she works with at the Medical Center.

"I have the opportunity everyday to watch the impact the Medical Center has on the lives in our community, including friends and family that live here," Nicholson said. "The most meaningful part, for me, is seeing the life changing effects of the care on people."

Article Comments

We reserve the right to remove any comment that violates our ground rules, is spammy, NSFW, defamatory, rude, reckless to the community, etc.

We expect everyone to be respectful of other commenters. It's fine to have differences of opinion, but there's no need to act like a jerk.

Use your own words (don't copy and paste from elsewhere), be honest and don't pretend to be someone (or something) you're not.

Our commenting section is self-policing, so if you see a comment that violates our ground rules, flag it (mouse over to the far right of the commenter's name until you see the flag symbol and click that), then we'll review it.